Fidel in the Cuban Socialist Revolution is the result of research conducted by a team of three professors of the Cuba Program of the Latin American Faculty of the Social Sciences (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, FLACSO for its initials in Spanish) of the University of Havana: Dr. José Bell Lara, Dra. Tania Caram León and Dra. Delia Luisa López García. They constitute the FLACSO-Cuba Cuban Revolution Research Group, which for fourteen years has worked together on three projects: Memoria Documental de la Revolución Cubana 1959–1965, which received the award of the Cuban Academy of Sciences in 2014, Memoria Documental de la Revolución Cubana 1966–1970, in progress, and Cuba: National Liberation and Socialist Transition.
This book focuses on one of the most extraordinary socio-political processes of the Western Hemisphere: a socialist revolution of national liberation, emerging in the periphery of the capitalist world-economy, and only a few kilometers from the world-system’s hegemonic core power.
In only three years (1959–1961), Fidel Castro and the revolutionary leadership, as rapidly as circumstances permitted, made advances in providing for the basic needs of the Cuban people, which had been accumulating a deficiency for years. There were few available strategies for attaining such advances. The most extensive and productive lands as well as the limited means of production and services were in the hands of foreign and domestic owners, both intimately tied to the ideology of free trade. Commodities proceeded to and from the United States on which the country was economically, commercially, and financially dependent. In order to advance in a continuous form, the revolutionary government had to break these ties and declare the full sovereignty of the nation over its territory.
Fidel was capable of discerning from the beginning that the Moncada program, proclaimed in his October 16, 1953 self-defense known as History Will Absolve Me, could not be implemented without anti-capitalist measures. He did not hesitate in proposing them and carrying them out, even though he fully understood the political and even the military costs to the nation that would result. Decisive anti-capitalist measures gave rise to a direct confrontation with the U.S. government, which, however, even before the nationalizations were carried out, had already decided on the destruction of the Cuban Revolution.
These initial years were very complicated. Within the country, an intense class struggle was unleashed, that well beyond the external hostility towards the Revolution included some initially within the Revolution. Those who failed
What is most clear is that it is impossible to write the history of the Cuban Revolution without Fidel Castro. He exercised his leadership through a permanent interaction with the people as a true popular educator. With simple words and clear examples, he explained for hours and hours the reasons for the measures that the Revolution was taking, in plazas full of people or in television appearances. Fidel’s pedagogical discourses became a tool for the socialization of the political power and the consciousness of the Cuban masses.
Such power of communication was immortalized by Che Guevara in 1965 in Socialism and Man in Cuba: “Fidel is the master of it. His particular style of integration with the people must be seen to be appreciated. In Fidel’s speeches before great public concentrations of people, there can be observed something like a dialogue of two tuning forks, whose vibrations provoke new vibrations in the speaker. Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate in a dialogue of glowing intensity, until reaching climax in a sudden ending, crowned by our shout for struggle and victory.”
We begin with a historic introduction, providing the English-speaking reader with some background knowledge of colonial and neocolonial Cuban society before the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. The text consists of a selection of the most important speeches, television appearances, and other public discourses of Fidel Castro during the period 1959 to 1961, with footnotes that provide clarification of words and events. The volume is organized by years, and each is preceded by a description of the events during the year. In addition, a glossary is included with more precise definitions and mini-biographies of persons that are alluded to in the historic introduction and in the texts of Fidel. At the end of the book is a bibliography consisting of the works consulted by the authors in the development of the historic introduction.
The work would not have been possible without the interest expressed by Dr. Ricardo A. Dello Buono, Professor of Sociology at Manhattan College in New York City, at the Conference of the Association of Humanist Sociology (AHS) held in Havana in November 2017. On that occasion, a work session that included Professor David Fasenfest of Wayne State University, Editor of the journal Critical Sociology led to definitive results. It was agreed that the authors would undertake a selection of Fidel’s speeches that would be particularly appropriate for English-speaking readers. To ensure an effective reach to global readership free of any political obstacles, it was agreed that the project would
The work culminated in a dedicated, delicate, and complex labor of translation into English by Dr. Charles McKelvey, Professor Emeritus of Presbyterian College in South Carolina, who has studied the Cuban revolutionary project over a period of decades. In the judgment of the authors, Dr. McKelvey has internalized the essence of a true translation: expressing in the codes of his mother language the particular texts that he is interpreting, sometimes departing from the strictly literal and perhaps linguistically exact replication in order to facilitate comprehension of revolutionary thought and reality. In the Translator’s Note, he explains further the approach adopted in his invaluable work.
Fidel in the Cuban Socialist Revolution is dedicated to the sixtieth anniversary of the Cuban revolutionary triumph and its leader Fidel Castro. In the context of a world agitated by a proliferation of objective and subjective conflicts in which a seemingly invulnerable bourgeois ideology has expanded on a planetary scale, this work seeks to make a modest contribution towards illuminating its real character.